Author Archive: Vygantas

Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Everyone is polishing their web browser and Firefox team is not an exception. They have just finished new Firefox 3 nightly build. Please not that this is not a final version, use it on your own risk. Changelog? Here it is.

the Opera Web browser is over 30% faster than IE, and faster and more secure than Firefox. Recent benchmarks show that Opera even exceeds the speed of Firefox with multiple tabs opened. Opera delivers robust security and a far-richer feature set than any other Web browser and it’s free.

Similar to Safari’s “browsers comparison”, just bit more sophisticated.

Good news for Mac OS X users, OmniWeb 5.6 was just released (requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 and later) which now supports OS X 10.5 “Leopard” and ads some new features. By the way, in case you didn’t knew… OmniWeb is not a free web browser; you will have to buy a license if you really like it. “OmniWeb runs in demonstration mode when unlicensed. The demo period is 30 launch days.”

Changelog

WebKit

The version of WebKit that OmniWeb is based off of has been updated.

We now use the WebKit icon database. This means that favicons saved to the disk should no longer grow infinitely and decrease performance.

This includes the new Web Inspector as seen on Surfin’ Safari

Addresses many site compatibility issues, improves performance and addresses various other bugs found in 5.5.4.

The Drosera JavaScript debugger now works in OmniWeb. (It is packaged with WebKit nightlies)

Improved JavaScript and plug-in performance.

Flash and other plug-in performance has been improved.

Interface

By default, OmniWeb will now display PDFs inside the browser. Right clicking on a PDF will give you display options including a way to open in preview.

The zoomed text editor button has moved out of text areas’ scroll bars. To access the zoomed text editor for a text area…

Select “Zoom…” from the context menu (Control-Click or Right-Click on the text area)

There is also now a status bar icon for the zoomed text editor that appears when you click in a text area.

The Favorites menu now consistently appears in the Bookmarks menu.

Added the iPhone to the list of browsers available for spoofing.

Added a new automatic Software Update interface. Next time OmniWeb is updated you will automatically be notified like normal along with release notes and the option to download and install.

Localization

Added a simplified Chinese localization.

Updated French, German and Japanese localizations.

Performance and Stability

Fixed a long-standing issue with bookmark synchronization where changes made on another computer would show up on the next launch, but then disappear again on the subsequent launch if you hadn’t made any further changes on the local machine.

Got some great news for Opera Mini users. Opera Mini 4 Beta 3 was released today and introduces some nice new features as well as many changes. Most interesting new feature in Beta 3 is “Opera Link (click for more details)”, basically it is bookmarks and speed dial synchronization between Opera and Opera Mini. Here’s the full changelog for the Opera Mini 4 Beta 3.

Added Opera Link support

Added Speed Dials

Added RSS feed support

Added shortcut *+0 for feeds

Added shortcuts for speed dials (‘*’ + speed dial number)

Added function to ask the transcoders for the title and favicon of a new bookmark or speed dial

Stylus devices can now scroll shortcut help overlays

Changed “Fit to width” to “Mobile view”

Changed “Autozoom” to “Show overview”

Low, medium and high image quality setting

Images fit better to the screen (no panning)

Improved BiDi support

Page position and scaling is now preserved after reload of page

Stylus devices without pointer motion events should be able to scroll anyway, just not in realtime

When you see something new in the web browsers world it always excites you, right? Not this time. TeaShark (alpha) is a mobile web browser and as they say “TeaShark is a new way to use the web when mobile.” It might sound good but it isn’t, it’s a clone. Just take a look at this demonstration.

TeaShark offers few new features although, it’s a smart address entry.

The engine remembers common patterns – popular sites, URLs – and the addresses you have visited*, incrementally filling the address bar as you type.